TWO years ago Selina Scott – who had been absent from our screens for a decade – returned to British television spitting indignation and resentment. The subject of her ire? Telly itself. She chomped with gusto on the hand that had fed her since 197
8 when she started out as a fresh-faced anchor in Aberdeen.
On a Five polemic called Don't Get Me Started: Why I Hate Television Today, Scott railed against the cruel exploitation of reality television (not for her the Jennie Bond experience of having rats scuttle over her while trapped in a coffin on I'm A Celebrity…), and claimed that news programmes continue to favour young female presenters paired up with older men. It's enough to make a top news anchor buy a farm, raise a herd of goats, and start a small business selling mohair socks for all occasions, which is exactly what Scott did.
Of course, when she helped launch the BBC's Breakfast Time in 1983, Scott was 32 and her co-presenter Frank Bough almost 20 years older. She was flirtatious in a severe sort of way, spoke in clipped BBC vowels and consonants, and resembled Princess Diana, thanks to those high collars and full, feathery shelf of blonde hair. Some would say that it's because of Scott, in fact, that we still have the coupling of the young, pretty woman with the older, serious man on the news sofa. Indeed she has said: "I played up to it to a degree." But that's precisely her point: she may have pioneered that mould, but television still hasn't broken out of it.
Now, ironically, Scott is suing the same TV channel that broadcast her anti-telly tirade. Last week she accused Five of age discrimination and will take them to an employment tribunal on the grounds that she was lined up as Natasha Kaplinsky's maternity cover on Five News but at the last moment, days before she was due to sign a contract, was dropped in favour of Isla Traquair, 28, and Matt Barbet, 32 – their combined ages just a little more than Scott's 57 years.
Scott is understood to be seeking compensation under the Age Discrimination Act and legal experts have claimed that Five – whose new director of programmes, Ben Gale, has been named as the man who will have to defend the channel's reputation – could have to find around £1m to settle out of court. There is a belief in legal circles that the case could open the floodgates for other people in the entertainment industry whose contracts are dropped as they get older.
There is no shortage of them. For a start, step up Moira Stuart – Britain's first black female news presenter who was axed by the BBC last year, reportedly for being too old. Or what about Anna Ford, who quit at the age of 62 because she didn't want to face being "shovelled off" to News 24? Earlier this year, Scott hit out at ageism at the BBC, claiming "Anna Ford has retired, Moira Stuart has been bumped, yet you look around and see lots of men". Last week Joan Bakewell added her support to Scott, writing that "television is a hideously young business" and "the only people of 60 they (TV execs] know are their mothers".
Scott grew up in Yorkshire, the daughter of a police sergeant and journalist and the eldest of five children. She cut her teeth in newspapers in Dundee before heading to the Isle of Bute to work as a press officer for the tourist board. Even then she loved the rural life, living in a caravan and then a cottage looking out to the Mull of Kintyre, a passion that would eventually overtake appearing on screen. Then it was off to Grampian Television where Scott was hired by Ted Brocklebank, then head of news and current affairs and now a Tory MSP, and with whom – in tabloid parlance – she was 'linked'. Much of Scott's personal life is conjecture, however, as she has always been stubbornly private, and has appeared to stay single.
"I've had my guys," she said in an interview two years ago, "but I pretty much forge my own path." One of those "guys" was rumoured to be Prince Andrew, though that could have been because they once did a flirtatious interview in which he lamented her refusal to give him her phone number at a previous meeting.
There has also been speculation about her sexuality – basically because she doesn't parade her relationships around for all to see – and in 2002 Scott broke her silence in outrage at a BBC documentary in which a TV critic claimed there could be "no sexual chemistry between her and any man on earth". Scott responded: "How dare Greg Dyke join in speculation on whether I'm a lesbian or not? It's not in my contract to tell them who I am seeing, who I am sleeping with, or anything else. My job is to be good at my job." She said she would never work for the BBC again.
Despite enjoying a long and impressive career, Scott has always had to prove herself to those (usually men) who argue she went far because of her looks rather than her brain. Donald Trump was particularly vindictive about Scott following an interview in the mid-1990s when he said: "You are obviously a woman who has seen better days."
From Grampian, Scott went to ITN to anchor News At 10 and from there to BBC's Breakfast Time, with its rudimentary sun logo and red leather sofas, before taking on The Clothes Show. She guest-hosted Wogan and in 1988 crossed the pond to New York to work for CBS. She felt better treated in the States, pointing out that "there is no such thing as a career in British television. It is possible in America, but it has never happened (back home]."
When she returned, she signed a major contract to work for Sky, and co-anchored the election night coverage in 1992 with David Frost. One colleague is quoted as saying: "She's terribly sweet, but you almost feel like you are in the company of royalty." Funnily enough, Scott tells a story of meeting Diana at a charity gala and the Princess of Wales saying: "People say you look like me." Scott replied: "Well, your Highness, I was here first," at which they both had a hearty laugh.
In 2001 she moved from Perthshire to her native north Yorkshire, after buying a 200-acre farm where she could raise her 27 angora goats. Since then, Scott has become known more for her love of the countryside and animals than her career in television, selling her mohair socks, winning the BBC's The Underdog Show with her dog Chump, and fronting a fashion campaign for Country Casuals.
Until the Five News maternity cover came up, Scott seemed to have no desire to return to television. "I love my spartan life and I've enjoyed my lower profile in recent years," she said. "When you're involved in TV it requires so much effort, particularly looking a certain way. I feel much calmer now I don't have those pressures."
Calmer? This is now a woman with something to prove.
Background Selina Scott studied English and American Literature at the University of East Anglia where Malcolm Bradbury remembers her as "spectacularly good looking… she was talented but it was the talent of character rather than intellect."
• Scott has a younger sister, Fiona, who is an artist and exhibited a portrait of her at London's National Portrait Gallery in 2007. Scott bought it.
• Scott's mohair socks business is a result of acquiring half a dozen pedigree goats when they were shipped from Texas by a Scots farmer hoping to diversify. But the wet lowlands of western Scotland didn't suit them so Scott stepped in, rescued them and bought her Yorkshire farm.
• Sir John Junor, ex-editor of the Sunday Express, once said Scott made rival presenters Angela Rippon, left, and Anna Ford look like "knitting crones".
• Frank Bough, Scott's co-presenter on BBC Breakfast Time, said: "When Selina joined, the producer said to me that her job was to look gorgeous and mine was to stop the roof falling in."
The full article contains 1399 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
